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IBM Extends Technology Support Services

Jan 15, 2013 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) --
IBM announced the expansion of its technical support services to now provide small and medium-sized businesses with the ability to offer global technology support to their customers, regardless of their location.

According to a release, as the imperative for businesses to expand into global markets continues, IBM provides them with single-source technical support services for a fraction of the cost of maintaining in-house skills or multiple regional service contracts.

IBM's new Managed Vendor Support Services gives clients the opportunity to scale their technical support offerings globally&mdash;at their own pace&mdash; via access to IBM's global reach, highly skilled technical professionals, worldwide parts network and logistics expertise. The new service helps growing companies calibrate the technical support needed by their customers in specific locations around the world and adjust the technical support model required. For example, small and mid-sized companies ranging from retail operations, to electronic game manufacturers to medical device providers can now cater to their customers' technical support needs around the globe.

Riverbed Technology, a company specializing in IT performance solutions, approached IBM shortly after going public in 2006 to help with its technical support and customer service offerings in order to remain competitive. The Riverbed technical support team collaborated with IBM's field service organization to deliver on-site services that minimized system downtime for customers. As a result, Riverbed has improved the performance of their customers' applications and network access to their data, while increasing transmission speeds by 5 to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times.

"By working with IBM, Riverbed is able to optimize solutions for our customers to increase the value of their existing IT infrastructure and the performance of their mission-critical applications," said Scott Downie, SVP of worldwide support, Riverbed. "IBM gave us the opportunity to focus on IT innovation, and helped us liberate businesses from common IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility&mdash;all while eliminating the need to increase bandwidth, storage or servers."
The company noted that the MVSS services brings a full technical support capability to clients and their worldwide customers, including call-center support, customer problem resolution and engineering support, onsite services, as well as parts inventory management, stocking and delivery.

"Through the expansion of Managed Vendor Support Services, IBM can help businesses of all sizes meet service level expectations and act as a trusted IT advisor," said Juhi Jotwani, VP, Multi-Vendor Services, Technical Support Service. "As a result, companies don't have to spend their time coordinating technical support services. And a single focal point may help to hasten recovery from, and potentially prevent the occurrence of outages."
More Information:
ibm.com/services/managedsupport
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